[General] Photon cycle rate in moving particle - faster or slower??

[John Williamson]

Dear Grahame and everyone,

Thank you for taking the trouble to circulate your arguments in pdf form, which I have now read.
One thing: I have your “correction” to your email yesterday, sent at Tuesday, June 21, 2016 12:15 PM, but not the email itself. This has happened to me before. I think it is down to our flaky system here in Glasgow which occasionally just vanishes some emails for no apparent reason. Could you please send it to me again?

Yes, on the “supporters”, I was being ironic. A great many of the most vocal supporters do not really understand it all. Unfortunately, this process seems to be endemic in many fields, not limited just to SR!

That some of the seminal experiments in relativity may be explained by other hypotheses comes as no surprise or revelation to me, however.  There has been a lot of work and a there is a great deal in the literature about this during the last century, starting with people like Lorentz himself. There was a lot about it earlier in this discussion group as well – and I suggest you download it and go through it.

The argument about contraction was advanced even before special relativity, and has been argued more recently by people like Reg Cahill as mentioned previously, and as you refer to. I do not agree with all of the precepts here and can only reconcile everything I know about experiment to my own satisfaction using more standard relativity, but am trying to keep an open mind.

The Maxwell stuff is really the other way round: Maxwell was covariant before relativity. The argument about travelling with the light you make is true, but it goes deeper than this. As you travel faster and faster with light, not only does the rate of change of phase slow, stopping when you reach lightspeed, but also the energy in the wave reduces, going to precisely zero at lightspeed. It becomes red-shifted to oblivion (as Chip put it in in a previous exchange). Indeed, at this point, the field does not develop – as there is no field to develop. This is what a null-vector means and the related to the meaning of saying that light is rest-massless. The new wave-function I have developed precisely parallels this behavior. As you co-move with it its energy goes to precisely zero. Of course real photons do have an energy, best viewed in the centre of momentum frame. All this means is that real photons are always ever so slightly “off mass shell”. Put another way, their velocity, when the inter-action with matter at both ends is considered, is effectively fractionally different to the limiting velocity of light. This is the same kind of argument, though over literally astronomical distances, that you apply to the transformation of light with multiple atoms in your Fizeau section.

The Fizeau stuff is interesting, and there are even more interesting things associated with light in matter, including the so-called Abraham-Minkowski paradox. You are right, amongst other things, that the transverse transformations are important, and I have been banging on about this in this forum for ages. I first considered this kind of problem properly when an aspect of it (momentum imparted to light travelling through a material) was brought up by Nick Green, a member of this group, years ago. As  light enters a material does the material move towards the light source, or away from it during the period the light is in the material? We subsequently had lots of memorable conversations about this – some conducted over a nice pint or two and several hours in the sunshine, where I managed to convince myself that both sides were true! Worse, in some pretty serious sessions with Martin van der Mark (over several days!) he agreed! This was, eventually, resolved for me by a brilliant paper from one of my Glasgow Colleagues Stephen Barnett (PRL 104 (7)), which I thoroughly recommend to everyone who wants to deepen their competence in this area. Briefly, it comes about from a mix-up in different aspects of things such as “momentum” where we use the same word to describe two quite different things. Read it, you will see what I mean. It is very beautiful.

Coming back to SR per-se. SR no longer relies just on the seminal experiments you quoted, but on a huge body of experiment consistent with it. For me, one of the most important experimental bases for this is the huge body of stuff on relativistic kinematics. For me, this is not just hearsay: I was personally involved with both experiments with fixed targets at CERN (where one body is in the roughly “stationary” frame with respect to the fixed stars) and with colliding beam experiments where both bodies are way (63 times their mass!) off. In both cases the resultant scattering was entirely consistent with the hypothesis that there is no fixed frame – that everything is “relative”. Now I did not design experiment to test this specifically – yet for all practical purposes this is the case. I would expect to see differences if there were any asymmetries in experiment as you suggest. This is not to say that alternatives are not possible – but that they must be consistent with this fact.

For me the argument is anyway a sterile one. I think that one needs to derive the reason for observing the experimental consequences of SR, not start with it as a pre-ordained basis. In this I agree with you. This comes down to the argument (See Jan Hilgevoord) as to whether space-time itself is an arena or an illusion. An Illusion in that its effect can be derived by considering what would be observed in scattering experiments conducted with light by observers, where elements of those observers themselves transform in a similar way. This has been a theme of earlier discussions. As I said, I think I can (and do) in this way derive SR from deeper principles such as the meaning and the conservation of energy and the linearity of field and related quantities.  I think this is the way to proper progress.

Regards, John W.
________________________________
From: General [general-bounces+john.williamson=glasgow.ac.uk at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] on behalf of Dr Grahame Blackwell [grahame at starweave.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 11:37 AM
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
Cc: Phil Butler; Anthony Booth; Stephen Leary; Mark, Martin van der; Solomon Freer
Subject: [General] Photon cycle rate in moving particle - faster or slower??

Hi Richard,

I'm not sure where you found your empirical evidence that "The helically-moving charged  photon composing the recoiling electron would continue to make two full helical loops for each wavelength (as in a resting electron) but at a higher looping frequency", I'd be very interested to see that.  Or is it just a supposition based on SR frame symmetry?

Either way it seems to me that this proposal creates a major problem for SR (and for the established empirical evidence): if the formative energy of a particle is circulating faster in a moving particle, then the effects of that energy flow (i.e. time effects within the particle, such as particle decay - which can ONLY be down to internal energy flow) will occur *faster* in a moving particle than in a static one; this appears to be totally contrary to observed fact, for example in fast-moving muons.  [I appreciate that this evidence relates to muons and you're talking about electrons - but if completely different principles apply in those two elementary particles I think we'll need an explanation for why - and some empirical evidence].

Best regards,
Grahame
----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Gauthier<mailto:richgauthier at gmail.com>
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion<mailto:general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org>
Cc: Phil Butler<mailto:phil.butler at canterbury.ac.nz> ; Anthony Booth<mailto:abooth at ieee.org> ; Stephen Leary<mailto:sleary at vavi.co.uk> ; Mark,Martin van der<mailto:martin.van.der.mark at philips.com> ; Solomon Freer<mailto:slf at unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 5:43 AM
Subject: Re: [General] PS: Matter comprised of light-speed energy

Hi John D,

   In Compton scattering, the wavelength of the incoming photon increases, not decreases, as the photon is scattered by the electron. The energy lost by the Compton-scattered x-ray photon is gained by the recoiling electron. The internal wavelength of the circulating spin-1/2 charged photon composing the recoiling electron would decrease corresponding to the increased energy of the recoiling electron. The helically-moving charged  photon composing the recoiling electron would continue to make two full helical loops for each wavelength (as in a resting electron) but at a higher looping frequency, corresponding to the shorter wavelength distance along the helix for two helical loops..

       Richard

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.natureoflightandparticles.org/pipermail/general-natureoflightandparticles.org/attachments/20160622/0d6a9c1f/attachment.htm>